Scaliger, it may be mentioned, retorted on Erasmus in very bitter terms, plying him with sharp invective, but not certainly in a very Ciceronian style. In the matter of pronunciation, Erasmus had already entered the lists against Reuchlin, and specially against Itacism, which that great scholar had vindicated, having being taught it by the Greeks that fled over to Europe after the capture of Constantinople.
But a crisis had been hastening on in Germany, and Erasmus was both by constitution and training unprepared to take a side. He abhorred persecution, detested war, and had written powerfully and bitterly against it. He had no love for the monks, and no veneration for a large portion of the popish ceremonial; but he shrank from such a sweeping revolution in creed, discipline, and government as followed upon the appearance of Luther. It took him by surprise; it shocked him and disappointed all his dreams of a peaceful reform, which, while it corrected glaring abuses and pruned the monasteries, would leave the Church of Rome in its power and splendour. Any reformation achieved by him would have been like putting the new wine into old bottles, or sewing the piece of new cloth on the old garment. His notion seems to have been that the revival of literature would secure the revival of a pure and free christianity—that the Romish church would of itself, in some auspicious hour, serenely accomplish a gradual and blessed change; as if the passion for prerogative would yield to a gentle murmur against it, and the love of ease be smitten with repentance because soft regrets were whispered about it. No: it needed a leonine nature, an audacious tongue, a fearless pen, and a strong arm to do the work. The air must not be wooed with a zephyr, but fiercely driven and purified by a thunderstorm. Erasmus for a season spoke of Luther and his progress with caution. He had himself been attacked by puny scribblers and fanatics like Lee and Stunica, his orthodoxy had been suspected, he had been called heresiarch and forger, and his enmity to the monastic orders was subjecting him to repeated fulminations. For some time, in fact, he was more keenly assailed than Luther. But he paused, when Luther advanced. He admitted the truth of many of the Lutheran assaults, and protested against the swift proscription of Luther's opinions at Rome, and the judicial burning of his books. But he could not sympathize with the bolder and rougher nature of the reformer, and he exhorted him to gentleness and compromise. Then, after several misunderstandings, had come the quarrel with Ulrich Von Hutten, the chief author of those unsparing, witty, and defiant satires in the Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum, addressed to Ortuinus the opponent of Reuchlin. The Expostulatio of Hutten, with all its declamatory and furious scurrility, was equalled, if not outdone in the same qualities, by the answer of Erasmus in his "Sponge." The plot was thickening around him, and the timid and somewhat selfish neutrality of Erasmus could be no longer preserved. Cajoled by one party and taunted by the other, he was greatly distracted, and he had by the expression of his two-sided opinions put himself into that ambiguous position in which neither party trusted him; esteemed, as he says, a Lutheran at Rome, and an anti-Lutheran in Germany; branded by either section as a cold, sneaking hypocrite, who would risk nothing either for the party to which he professedly belonged, or for that which had embodied so many of the opinions which he expressed and published.
But he slowly made up his mind to attack Luther, and in 1525 appeared his book "De Libero Arbitrio." The question discussed is a deep if not an insoluble one, and might seem to be remote from the Lutheran quarrel. But Luther at once saw the directness of the attack; it went at once to the throat (ipsum jugulum) of the new doctrine, as he says in the conclusion of his De Servo Arbitrio. Luther's doctrine was a partial revival of Augustine's, and comes closer to man's spiritual experiences and struggles than that of his antagonist, who learned it in the semipelagianism of the Greek church. The style of Erasmus in this book is not that of a man in earnest about a matter of life and death; it has a frosty elegance about it, as if he were playing with his theme. Erasmus also replied to Luther in 1526-27 in two books ("Hyperaspistes"), in which his temper sometimes breaks out not to the advantage of his argument; nay, he stooped to write to the elector of Saxony, asking him to punish Luther—at least to censure and restrain him. To illustrate the spirit of the age, it may be mentioned, that at the instigation of Noel Bedon (Beda), Berquin, one of the disciples of Erasmus, was seized at Paris, and after three years of respite, tortured and burnt at the stake. The Reformation was at length established and the mass abolished in Basle, which had been for years the resting-place of Erasmus. The senate demanded of him a confession of faith, and he published his "Consilium Senatui." At length, in 1529, he left that city and retired to Freiburg in the Brisgau, having bought himself a house. But though he lived on good terms with the Franciscans near him, he did not get beyond the reach of annoyance, as his "Epistola contra quosdam qui se falso jactant evangelicos" testifies. The diet of Augsburg met the following year, and he was invited, but refused on the score of age and growing infirmities. He wrote, however, to Cardinal Campegius, pressing him to dissuade the emperor from a religions war. At Freiburg he dedicated his "Christian Widow" to Mary, queen-dowager of Hungary. Three years afterwards he published a treatise on "Ecclesiastical Concord," which was met by the Lutheran Quatenus Expediat, &c., (Why peace till truth be vindicated?) In August, 1535, he returned to Basle to superintend the printing of his "Ecclesiastes," and he was engaged also on an edition of Origen. An attack of gout confined him for months to the house, and he employed his leisure in writing a commentary on the fifteenth psalm, "De Puritate Tabernaculi." Disease grew rapidly upon him, but he maintained his wit and serenity to the last. Dysentery seized him, and, feeling that his end was at hand, he sought no confessor, no sacerdotal absolution, but repeatedly commended his soul to Christ. With the words "Lieber Gott" on his lips, he died, 12th July, 1536, at the age of seventy, and was buried with great pomp in the cathedral, the senate of the university joining in the funeral procession. A monument to his memory was erected in the church by his friends and executors, Amerbachius, Froben, and Episcopius. A statue of wood was erected in his native city of Rotterdam in 1549, and another of bronze in 1622. His portrait by Holbein is in the museum of the Louvre. A cardinal's hat had been expected for him not long before he died. Erasmus, according to his own description, was short in stature, with a delicate complexion, fair hair, and grey eyes, but possessed a graceful and well-shaped figure, "corpusculo satis compacto et eleganti." His signet had on it a figure of the god Terminus, with the motto, "Cedo Nulli," referring not to himself, as his enemies alleged, but to the invincibility of the "last enemy." His original name which was Gerhard Gerhardi, he changed or translated into the double Latin and Greek form, Desiderius Erasmus (Beloved-Desire). Erasmius would have been the proper form, and, indeed, he gave the word in this shape to young Froben his nameson.
The labours of Erasmus were wonderful in their number, and of great importance in their place. His was the earliest edition of the Greek New Testament, unsealing the book of books to thousands. What MSS. he had he seems diligently to have used. In an age when the authority of the Vulgate was paramount, the publication of the inspired original did immense service to spiritual freedom. By his notes and paraphrases, he opened up the way to a simple, honest, and grammatical exposition, alike removed from scholastic subtleties, and the traditional dictates of ecclesiastical authority. It was ordained by statute in 1547, that a copy of his annotations should be placed in every parish church in England, and so placed upon a desk that every one might read it. He wished the scriptures to be in the hands of everybody, and "to be read and understood not only by the Scotch and Irish, but even by the Turks and Saracens;" the antithesis showing that he regarded the Scotch and Irish as being close on the extreme of barbarism. Not a few of the fathers also were first edited by him—Jerome, Cyprian, Hilary, Irenæus, Ambrose, Augustine, with portions of Chrysostom, Athanasius, and Basil. Origen was in the press at his death. These editions were enough to have filled the lifetime of a student, without the broken health and continuous wanderings of Erasmus. To him classical literature also is deeply indebted. He edited Seneca, Suetonius, Livy, Terence, Quintus Curtius, Pliny, and portions of Cicero, with Aristotle and Demosthenes; translating into Latin also the larger portion of Lucian and Plutarch, with several dramas of Euripides and orations of Libanius. No one north of the Alps gave such an impulse to the revival of classical literature as did the laborious and vagrant scholar of Rotterdam. From the beginning of his celebrity he seems to have been pecuniarily in comfortable circumstances. His dedications brought him money, and he very often tells in his
